The youngest of eight children, Walker was born to impoverished African-American sharecroppers in rural Georgia, at a time of huge racial tumult and violence. She won a scholarship to Georgia’s Spelman College, and then another to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, which was then an overwhelmingly white institution.
As an activist in the Civil Rights movement, Walker first won attention for her writing with an acclaimed essay, The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It ? Since then she has published collections of short stories and poetry and a number of novels, including Meridian, The Temple of My Familiar, and her most popular work, The Color Purple, which won her the Pulitzer Prize.
Throughout her life and writing, Walker has been an outspoken activist, known for her involvement with a large variety of causes, including the Women’s movement and the environmental lobby. The following article brings many of her key concerns powerfully to the fore as she writes about the abortion debate and attacks white men’s power as lawmakers.
What is of use in these words I offer in memory and recognition of our common mother. And to my daughter.
What can the white man say to the black woman?
For four hundred years he ruled over the black woman’s womb.
Let us be clear. In the barracoons and along the slave shipping coasts of Africa, for more than twenty generations, it was he who dashed our babies’ brains out against the rocks.
What can the white man say to the black woman?
For four hundred years he determined which black woman’s children would live or die.
Let it be remembered. It was he who placed our children on the auction block in cities all across the eastern half of what is now the United States, and listened to and watched them beg for their mother’s arms, before being sold to the highest bidder and dragged away.
What can the white man say to the black woman?
We remember that Fannie Lou Hamer, a poor sharecropper on a Mississippi plantation, was one of twenty-one children; and that on plantations across the South black women often had twelve, fifteen, twenty children. Like their enslaved mothers and grandmothers before them, these black women were sacrificed to the profit the white man could make from harnessing their bodies and their children’s bodies to the cotton gin. What can the white man say to the black woman?
We see him lined up on Saturday nights, century after century, to make the black mother, who must sell her body to feed her children, go down on her knees to him.
Let us take note:
He has not cared for a single one of the dark children in his midst, over hundreds of years.
Where are the children of the Cherokee, my great grandmother’s people?
Gone.
Where are the children of the Blackfoot?
Gone.
Where are the children of the Lakota?
Gone.
Of the Cheyenne?
Of the Chippewa?
Of the Iroquois?
Of the Sioux?
Of the Mandinka?
Of the Ibo?
Of the Ashanti?
Where are the children of the ‘Slave Coast’ and Wounded Knee?
We do not forget the forced sterilizations and forced starvations on the reservations, here as in South Africa. Nor do we forget the smallpox-infested blankets Indian children were given by the Great White Fathers of the United States government.
What has the white man to say to the black woman?
When we have children you do everything in your power to make them feel unwanted from the moment they are born. You send them to fight and kill other dark mothers’ children around the world. You shove them onto public highways in the path of oncoming cars. You shove their heads through plate glass windows. You string them up and you string them out.
What has the white man to say to the black woman?
From the beginning, you have treated all dark children with absolute hatred.
Thirty million African children died on the way to the Americas, where nothing awaited them but endless toil and the crack of a bullwhip. They died of a lack of food, of lack of movement in the holds of ships. Of lack of friends and relatives. They died of depression, bewilderment and fear. What has the white man to say to the black woman?
Let us look around us: Let us look at the world the white man has made for the black woman and her children.
It is a world in which the black woman is still forced to provide cheap labor, in the form of children, for the factories and on the assembly lines of the white man.
It is a world into which the white man dumps every foul, person-annulling drug he smuggles into creation.
It is a world where many of our babies die at birth, or later of malnutrition, and where many more grow up to live lives of such misery they are forced to choose death by their own hands.
What has the white man to say to the black woman, and to all women and children everywhere?
Let us consider the depletion of the ozone; let us consider homelessness and the nuclear peril; let us consider the destruction of the rain forests – in the name of the almighty hamburger. Let us consider the poisoned apples and the poisoned water and the poisoned air and the poisoned earth.
And that all of our children, because of the white man’s assault on the planet, have a possibility of death by cancer in their almost immediate future.
What has the white, male lawgiver to say to any of us? To those of us who love life too much to willingly bring more children into a world saturated with death?
Abortion, for many women, is more than an experience of suffering beyond anything most men will ever know; it is an act of mercy, and an act of self-defense.
To make abortion illegal again is to sentence millions of women and children to miserable lives and even more miserable deaths.
Given his history, in relation to us, I think the white man should be ashamed to attempt to speak for the unborn children of the black woman. To force us to have children for him to ridicule, drug and turn into killers and homeless wanderers is a testament to his hypocrisy.
What can the white man say to the black woman?
Only one thing that the black woman might hear.
Yes, indeed, the white man can say, Your children have the right to life. Therefore I will call back from the dead those 30 million who were tossed overboard during the centuries of the slave trade. And the other millions who died in my cotton fields and hanging from my trees.
I will recall all those who died of broken hearts and broken spirits, under the insult of segregation.
I will raise up all the mothers who died exhausted after birthing twenty-one children to work sunup to sundown on my plantation. I will restore to full health all those who perished for lack of food, shelter, sunlight, and love; and from my inability to see them as human beings.
But I will go even further:
I will tell you, black woman, that I wish to be forgiven the sins I commit daily against you and your children. For I know that until I treat your children with love, I can never be trusted by my own. Nor can I respect myself.
And I will free your children from insultingly high infant mortality rates, short life spans, horrible housing, lack of food, rampant ill health. I will liberate them from the ghetto. I will open wide the doors of all the schools and hospitals and businesses of society to your children. I will look at your children and see not a threat but a joy.
I will remove myself as an obstacle in the path that your children, against all odds, are making toward the light. I will not assassinate them for dreaming dreams and offering new visions of how to live. I will cease trying to lead your children, for I can see I have never understood where I was going. I will agree to sit quietly for a century or so, and meditate on this.
This is what the white man can say to the black woman. We are listening.